Global Pulse, the United Nations innovation initiative on big data and data science, and Western Digital Corp. announced the winning solutions of the Data for Climate Action (D4CA) challenge at an event during COP23, a United Nations climate change conference. The challenge, which was launched earlier this year, is an unprecedented open innovation competition to harness data science and big data to accelerate climate solutions. The challenge was organized by UN Global Pulse with the support of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and Western Digital.

The D4CA challenge demonstrates what is possible when public and private sector organizations partner for social good. Access to large amounts of data - anonymized and aggregated to protect privacy - accelerates the ability to derive insights and develop predictive algorithms that provide more precise solutions.

UN Global Pulse and Western Digital recently announced the winners of D4CA at an event on Data Innovation: Generating Climate Solutions, held during COP23 in Bonn, Germany. The innovation event celebrated the winning projects and brought together business leaders, data scientists, and climate experts for interactive talks, discussions, and demonstrations of data visualizations and innovations.

More than 450 teams of specialized data scientists and researchers from 67 countries applied to participate in the challenge. Of these, 97 semi-finalists worked to develop innovation projects using datasets and tools from 11 different companies.